The following relates generally to wireless communication, and more specifically to quasi co-location of antenna ports used to transmit paging message and synchronization signals.
Wireless communications systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, and so on. These systems may be capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing the available system resources (e.g., time, frequency, and power). Examples of such multiple-access systems include code division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency division multiple access (FDMA) systems, and orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems, (e.g., a Long Term Evolution (LTE) system, or a New Radio (NR) system). A wireless multiple-access communications system may include a number of base stations or access network nodes, each simultaneously supporting communication for multiple communication devices, which may be otherwise known as user equipment (UE).
In some wireless systems, devices (e.g., base stations and UEs) may communicate using directional transmissions (e.g., beams), in which beamforming may be applied using multiple antenna elements to steer a beam in a particular direction. In some cases, a base station may be unaware of a particular location of a UE, such as when a gap in communications occurs while a UE is moving. When a first device does not know the direction in which to transmit to a second device, the first device may transmit to the second device by sweeping through a set of beams focused in different directions, and transmitting a duplicative signal or information on each of the beams. Additionally or alternatively, the second device may sweep through a set of beams in an attempt to locate the beam or beams on which the first device is transmitting. However, sweeping through a set of beams is costly in terms of time, power consumption, and air resources.
One example of such costly beam sweeping operations includes paging operations. UEs may typically enter a discontinuous reception (DRX) mode to conserve power by powering down or off certain communication chains of the UE. The DRX cycle may include the UEs waking up after a DRX period to listen for paging messages. In a wireless system that uses beamforming techniques, the UE may have moved while in the DRX mode and this may require to the UE to determine (or re-determine) which receive beam the UE will use to listen for paging signals. This again may result in the UE having to sweep through multiple beams to identify the best receive beam, which may be costly in terms of time, power consumption, air resources, and the like.